Listen: NPR, NAACP Mark 150th Anniversary of Ft. Sumter Attacks

Today marks the 150th Anniversary of the Confederate attack on Charleston, South Carolina’s Ft. Sumter, which marked the beginning of the Civil War.

For the next four years, the American media will focus on the sesquicentennial of the war, and while some organizations will no doubt attempt to romanticize or glorify the era, the NAACP is determined to make sure that the true history will be told.

This morning, National Public Radio commemorated the anniversary by interviewing NAACP Vice President for Stakeholder Relations Rev. Nelson B. Rivers.

"No matter how you dress it up, how you try to revise history," Rivers says, "when you're finished with this story, the war was about the South, and my state in particular, South Carolina, wanting to be able to hold black people as property. That's wrong."